About Renderfarm.fiMake sure you are also familiar with both our policies, terms of use and output licensing. For any technology related questions, you can consult the Renderfarm.fi FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) and the Forum.What is Renderfarm.fi? (also available in )

Renderfarm.fi is and always will be a completely free and open platform for doing distributed rendering over the Internet. As well as enabling artists to share computing resources between each other, Renderfarm.fi gives us, the volunteers, the ability to help them in the creation of their art.By using Renderfarm.fi, graphic artists and animators benefit from the ability to use higher image quality and higher resolution when rendering. Renderfarm.fi also enables and encourages everybody to participate in the rendering of stills and animations, regardless of whether they themselves are able to do 3D graphics. It takes only five minutes to volunteer. By dividing the work among hundreds of computers, an animation that takes months to render on one machine can be completed in only a few days.For a quick briefing check out the cool "What is Renderfarm.fi?" video created by community member Jani Lintunen (Jerico) on our official Youtube channel:

Bridging the Digital Gap: Why should you volunteer?

The wide spread use of CGI also means that today’s movie audiences, be they at the theatre or lying down on their living room couch, are not easy to satisfy. This means that movies being developed on a low budget are far stretched to compete with the visuals that big budget movies boast. In fact, in this it seems that while the advancement of digital technology has bridged gaps, it has also introduced new ones.We believe that the cultural movement represented by community based services like Renderfarm.fi, best described as the democratization of media, should be embraced. Simply by volunteering your computer to compute for Renderfarm.fi you can be a part of this movement. We're making Renderfarm.fi as accessible as possible and enabling as many people as possible to both take part in and use the technologies behind the service. In order to reach our goal for total accessibility, we've chosen to support Blender, the world's most popular open source 3D suite. Supporting Blender means that we can reach out to everybody on equal ground.As new services are bringing people together in new ways and empowering individuals to be creative and to be heard, regardless of their background, the combination of Blender and Renderfarm.fi enables almost anybody - whether a poor student from Asia or the owner of a large animation studio in the US - to create professional level 3D stills and animation. Renderfarm.fi and the project that originally made it possible, BURP, could be recognized as rare exceptions among a plethora of BOINC projects because no lengthy analysis or scientific know-how is necessary to understand the images and movie clips that are produced. They speak their own universal language.The Technology: Openness is a state of mind

The development of open source technologies such as GPL-licensed Blender and the LGPL-licensed BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) made the creation of BURP (Big and Ugly Rendering Project) viable. The BURP software, originally created by Janus Kristensen and now developed in co-operation between Kristensen and the Renderfarm.fi team, is an open source project developing software for doing publicly distributed rendering of computer generated 3D animations and stills. BURP is free software distributed under the GNU GPL v3 license.Openness is a state of mind. Renderfarm.fi and the technologies behind it make rendered animations and images public. In an effort to offer a completely transparent service, we will never obfuscate or encrypt any of the renders that get done on the service. People who feel uncomfortable with this will probably never use this service. Meanwhile, the more open minded of us are likely to embrace this opportunity to share our extra resources with people hoping realize their full potential as artists.Our sponsors

We wish express our gratitude to the sponsors that have made Renderfarm.fi a possibility through their contribution in both expertise and funding. These include Laurea UAS, the Finnish State Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation Tekes, Otaverkko Ltd, Star Wreck Studios Ltd and the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions COSS.Yours,

2010-09-06: Renderfarm.fi - Renderfarm.fi and Wreckamovie.com launch integrationWe're excited to announce that new integrated functionality between Renderfarm.fi and the communal movie production website Wreckamovie.com has been launched. Users of Wreckamovie.com are offered a simple way to create an account on Renderfarm.fi, synchronize the accounts and add their own sessions from Renderfarm.fi as "shots" on Wreckamovie.com. As this is planned to be the first stepping stone in integration, we hope that the future will bring users of both services many more cool features.

Wreckamovie.com - started some three years ago by the same people who gave life to Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning (the most viewed Finnish film of all times) - is a free to use web service that brings people together in order to create movies. The service recently achieved a milestone as the first full-length feature film to incorporate the concept of using community manpower from the beginning to the end of the production, Snowblind, was finished. Renderfarm.fi is a free community based rendering service that first opened to the public in summer 2009. The service aims at making accessible distributed rendering available to anybody who needs it, anytime they need it, regardless of their geological location or financial background.

Assembly 2010: Independent movies, Blender and Renderfarm.fi

The producer of Snowblind, Kalle Max Hofmann visited the Renderfarm.fi stand and presented about the creation of Snowblind with #blender.fi community member Hannu Hoffren at Assembly 2010 computer fair in Helsinki, Finland between 6th and 8th of August 2010. As BURP (the open source back-end technology used by Renderfarm.fi) head developer Janus Kristensen was also visiting Helsinki for the fair, we got interviewed for AssemblyTV about Renderfarm.fi, BURP and community based independent movie production. The interview was carried out by Brendan Ratliff (also known with his scene alias Syphus), who we thought did an excellent job in capturing the essence of the underlying technology and concepts. You can now watch the video on the Renderfarm.fi Youtube channel:

I'm happy to announce that we received notice today that Renderfarm.fi has been chosen to receive the EUROPRIX Quality Seal. EUROPRIX was started by the Austrian presidency in 1998 as an EU member states initiative, supported by the European Commission DG Enterprise and Information Society, governments of other countries in the European Union and private industry. Its main activity was the organisation of the pan-European Multimedia Content Award.Anja Pohl from the EUROPRIX offices in Salzburg, Austria writes: We would like to thank you very much for your participation in the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards 2010. We want to congratulate you on the high quality of your EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards 2010 entry and are delighted to inform you that your project with the ID 1049 was awarded the official EUROPRIX Quality Seal. The Quality Seal winners will be showcased within September on the EUROPRIX website.Your achievement is outstanding because 299 entries from 30 countries were evaluated by the jury team of the EUROPRIX Multimedia Awards. Your project was evaluated in two rounds by two different panels of jurors. By awarding the quality seal they wish to recommend your project to consumers and users. The EUROPRIX Quality Seal is proof that your project is highly innovative and creative. Only 36 projects received the quality seal.It goes without saying that Renderfarm.fi's success in this multimedia competition is directly tied to the work carried out for years by Janus Kristensen in BURP. In this I think the Quality Seal should apply to the original project aswell. Equally I think this has been a team effort so I'd like to thank my development team of Nathan Letwory, Jesse Kaukonen, Olivier Romand and Samuel Anjam for their efforts. I also thought that this would also be a perfect time to thank all the people who've contributed to the project in the form of their thesis works and/or traineeships at Laurea UAS: Lauri Viitala, Lassi Haaranen, Heikki Seppälä, Niko Suomalainen, Jani Lintunen, Juha Laakso, Mikael Kääriäinen and Laura Aspholm. Finally I'd like to thank all of you - the volunteers. You make Renderfarm.fi possible.

2010-11-09: Our resident build guru Gekko just uploaded the new Blender Renderfarm.fi v2.55 builds on to our website. The new build offers new functionality in the form of an interactive summary page that displays feedback on the status of the different settings - something that was only available in the console previously. You can download the latest version of the build from here. The rendering clients for v2.55 will hopefully be up by the end of the week.The problem with Python insists and as of yet the Python devs have not shown much compassion for our cause. If you'd like to help us in getting this issue fixed (meaning that the uploader provided with the main branch of Blender would work directly without tweaks), please go tell the Python devs that you want this fixed. You can do so by logging on and writing a comment on this page. Thank you for your continued support guys!

Sometimes it's important to reflect on the past in order to appreciate the current. Indeed 2010 was a great year for us. Although it started slowly, our efforts on the back-end (BURP) and front-end (Blender 2.5) are bearing fruit as the service and the open values it advocates are slowly seeping into the public conciousness. I feel that a witness to this fact is our recent nomination to the prestigious World Summit Award as the Finnish candidate in the category of "e-entertainment and games".

I'm pleased to say that since June 2010, we got over 1500 new registrants and the last check on the amount of clients that have attached at one point or another was nearing 2000. That's alot of rendering power - available from anywhere, anytime - to anyone. August saw our "uploader" integrated into the main release of Blender and in the same month we announced our collaboration with the award winning communal movie production platform Wreckamovie.com. Although this integration is yet to really prove it's worth, I'm sure we will be doing alot more stuff with them in the future.

While a lot of work still remains ahead of us, I feel more confident than ever of the fact that open rendering will soon be able to offer a viable, professional, alternative to using costly closed rendering services. In order to get there, here are only some things that you can expect from us in 2011: HDRI support, higher memory limitation on sessions (4GB and up), support for at least one other open source rendering engine and so on.

Finally as we missed the opportunity to wish you all a Merry Christmas, I thought it's only proper that we somehow acknowledge everybody's crunching efforts and wish you a Happy New Year 2011. Thank you all for participating! (Original art by Jani Lintunen).

2011-09-29: Today I committed the next version of the Renderfarm.fi Uploader into Blender trunk. Without going too much into formal talk, here's the commit message to those of you who are interested:- You must now log in first before doing anything. Old system did everything in one call, while this new system has 3 calls:Login and check password, downloading session informationDo optional session list refreshingHandle file uploads to the service- Changed the UI:You can no longer edit ore_resox or the other ore settings. These are copied from Blender's render settings directlyYou can change ore parts and ore memory usage, but these are tagged as "optional advanced settings"There is now a link to the Renderfarm.fi render panel in the main render panel. You can easily switch between Blender Render and Renderfarm.fi renderThe UI gives you visible errors instead of hiding these in the console, although not all errors are visible- The preparation is performed once the user presses "upload" or changes to the Renderfarm.fi tabThis no longer stops the upload, but instead gives a warning if there are issuesIf a texture is not found, give a warningIf a linked file is not found, give a warning- The file is no longer saved into the original master file, but a copy is created with the name "renderfarm.blend". - Short description field was removed. This still exists code-wise, but it's simply filled with a dummy letter. Instead, the UI asks for simply "description" and "tags". Tags might be implemented soon-ish.- The old method of listing and canceling sessions is completely re-written:The new system fetches out all the user's sessions and stores them in lists, then fetching what is required. The old system required a new XMLRPC call if you wanted to switch your selected list from one to another such as "completed" to "canceled". I removed this "list by session type" -feature entirely and simply added one list that has everything. The sessions still have the % complete next to the name.Canceling works like before, except it gives a visible error if canceling isn't possible (ie session is already running or rejected)There is a refresh button that fetches out new listings from the server- Particles generate a warning:If there are emitter type particles, recommend checking particle bakingIf there are hair type particles with child_type 'SIMPLE', change the mode to 'INTERPOLATED'. This seems to fix most of our problems. Also shows a note about this- Fluid simulations generate a warning about them not working at all. This won't prevent uploading.The most adventurous of you can download the latest Blender trunk and fetch the script from it, then place it in 2.59/scripts/addons. Otherwise, you can simply wait for the Blender 2.60 release which has the new version. If you spot any bugs, don't be shy to mention them!